My Biography

My name is Micheál Lacey and I’d like to welcome you to Philosophical Counselling Ireland. Philosophical counseling is a relatively new phenomenon in Ireland, though of course its roots go all the way back to Ancient Greece circa 500BC. A German philosopher by the name of Gerd Achenbach is accredited with re-inventing philosophical counselling as a discipline in its own right. He created his own practice in 1984 and his initiative has spread throughout the world and has affected all those philosophers disenchanted with academic philosophy as a way of life.

I am one such philosopher affected by this movement. From a young age I was interested in questions of authenticity and truth and I had a proclivity for using logical reasoning in the resolution of problems that faced me. I entered Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy in September of 1999. In this college, I was exposed to some of the greatest thinkers over a two and a half thousand year tradition: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul-Sartre, Immanuel Kant, David Hume, Martin Heidegger to name just a few. Though it was an academic environment and a pure philosophy course, due to small class sizes and a relaxed relationship between lecturers and students, the true nature of philosophy was allowed to flourish. Philosophy was never simply an academic subject to master and attain accolades, it was a challenge to live more fully an examined and authentic life.

On finishing my degree, I had planned to pursue psychoanalysis. I had been strongly influenced by Jonathan Hanaghan’s interpretation and development of Freud’s theories. Hanaghan interjected a spiritual component to the otherwise deterministic and biological reductionism of traditional psychoanalysis. Not being old enough for the criteria laid out by the various psychoanalytic institutions (I was 24 and the minimum age of entry was 26) I decided to pursue a philosophy MA to analyze the philosophical foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis. It was intended that this would take me through two years of academic research.

The title of my MA was ‘The Scientific Status of Freudian Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Perspective.’ After my first year of research, I became disenchanted with Freud’s theories of psychology. I required a new director after the first year which extended my research and in the following years my research, mostly epistemological (the study of knowledge) in nature, ended in an in-depth analysis of the issue at hand and I attained the highest mark awarded for my efforts.

Still interested in a variety of therapeutic schools, but no particular one, and still interested in pursuing philosophy, but not wishing to pursue a purely academic career, I decided to bridge the gap between my two interests and pursue philosophical counselling. The therapeutic value inherent in philosophy has too often been neglected. With the growing movement of philosophical practice throughout the world, I wished to contribute to giving philosophy back its proper place in the world. This involves taking philosophy form academic life and bringing it to the “market-place” where a process of ethical and rational dialogue can take place for the purpose of pursuing an authentic and examined life. I have been practicing since and have found it an emphatically important, thoroughly beneficial and necessary endeavour.

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